Month: January 2012

Proving once again that Christian evangelists with a camera have, historically, thought of nothing better to do with their faith and technology-on-hand than recording and selling a pop culture Five Minutes Hate, here’s some Canadian Christians slagging off Ninja Turtles for being “Hinduist humanist occult” something something.

Theists have really gone overboard this time in labelling anyone who disagrees with them as being engaged in hate speech against them. With more specificity, the Delhi High Court has demanded that Facebook — the international social media site — remove all images the judge has deemed “hateful”: to wit, images of Hindu deities, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. Yes, the Muslim prophet Mohammed, a prophet who existed before cameras and thus whom nobody knows what he actually looks like. Meaning every image, of anything, that anyone claims is of Mohammed, is violating this ruling and must be removed.Continue reading “Hate speech, or free speech?”→

Closing a tumultuous week of wide protest against PIPA and SOPA – two MPAA backed anti-piracy bills – Dodd threatened to stop the cash-flow to politicians who dare to take a stand against pro-Hollywood legislation. Clear bribery, the petition claims, and already thousands agree.

Via someone on Twitter sometime this past weekend (I swear, I noted it somewhere, but I can’t find the note now), this awesome resource would come in exceptionally handy the next time you’re perusing a science magazine at a doctor’s waiting room, or your work’s lunch room newspaper.

Okay. New plan for world domination. I’m going to make a lot of money… somehow… off of creating a digital version of this that we can stick onto certain media websites with penchants for posting terrible pseudoscience. Like Google Sidewiki only designed to eviscerate nonsense-peddlers.

(What? It’s no worse a plan than those underpants gnomes have, is it?)

Every damn conversation we’ve had over the past several years in our respective atheist/skeptic communities that even approaches the topic of feminism, or discusses women in any way, seems to attract the sort of person in our communities who demands that we prove that feminism — the idea that women are human beings and should be treated with basic human dignity — is skeptical. Who evidently believes that the natural overlap between skepticism and feminism is insufficient for the topic to be broached. That the feminists in the skepticism community are not turning a skeptical eye to their dogmatically held beliefs that women shouldn’t be systematically mistreated or disadvantaged by any social structure that we humans have built.

Skeptical Science has posted a thorough and comprehensive review of all the scientific literature, weighing all the various contributing variables leading to the present warming trend. We humans and our activities are, far and away, the number one contributing factor.

Well, what was left of him after Stephanie provided the science that shows that practicing hebephiles actually do, demonstrably, harm the children they victimize, anyway. (Yes, I’m late to this game too. The blogosphere is a busy place and, like I said recently, I’m playing catch-up right now.)

Jesse Bering of Bering In Mind made several mistakes in tackling the subject of hebephilia as presented by a reader. He took a number of things at face value, and did not delve deeper into the quandry presented regarding sexual “moral panics” and whether there’s any good reason to excoriate this writer despite his seeming attempt at honest discourse. There were many red flags in the original letter, and Bering missed them and did not take the opportunity to interrogate those red flags, and for that he got raked over the proverbial coals by the blogosphere. Bering wrote an addendum, which did much to provide us with a mea culpa and put the focus back on the letter-writer and the topic at hand. Which is good, because there were many, MANY loose threads in said letter left by Bering in his original coverage, which really needed to be tugged at. And Bering’s addendum, too, needed further interrogation.Continue reading “Scicurious and Kate Clancy destroy the “deep-thinking hebephile””→

I will happily admit, the next several posts over the next several days constitute me trying to play some amount of catch-up with my ever-burgeoning Firefox tabs and RSS feeds. I’m trying to post a bunch of days ahead of time, too, so I might be reporting on some older stuff. But I’ll try to keep it fresh and relevant with my opinionation. Apologies if we’re covering ground you’ve already covered, you savvy and avid reader you.